It was just recently that Metro Detroit mother Rebecca Bredow stated publicly that she would ‘rather sit behind bars for standing up for what she believes in, than giving into something she strongly doesn't believe in.’ A few short days later, she was in front of an Oakland County judge, who made the following statement during the opening minutes of the court proceedings:

"I want to make it perfectly clear. We’re leaving here today. Dad’s picking the child up and he’s going to be vaccinated regardless of what Mom did or didn’t do."

Despite what Bredow and her counsel did or didn’t do, the end result of a long year of litigation was a seven-day jail time for Bredow, temporary loss of physical custody of her son, and a court order to vaccinate the child "…as rapidly as medically necessary" with reportedly eight vaccines. National and international headlines buzzed, attempting to maximize the clickbait shock factor of Bredow’s predicament. Stories were thrown together by journalists and media outlets with little-to-no knowledge of the tenets of informed consent, parental choice, or the volumes of existing official documentation pointing to the risks associated with vaccines.

After five days of jail time and a criminal record, Bredow has been released and is set to face Judge McDonald once again this Wednesday. The court date is slated as a "review hearing" and all eyes will be on the subject matter and outcome of the encounter.

Days after Bredow’s sentencing, another vaccine choice case went before the same judge in the same court. The mother, Lori Matheson, who was granted a status of a primary person responsible for her daughter Faith, was in a battle to affirm her parental choice and not have her daughter vaccinated. Previously, a referee’s order allowed Faith’s Dad to vaccinate the child; however, during the trial Matheson stated why she objected to the order:

"I started reading literature on vaccinations," she said. "When I started reading them that's when I found out there are some vaccinations that are cultured in aborted fetal cells."

Matheson considers the use of aborted fetal cell lines in the vaccine manufacturing process against her religious beliefs. With educational religious waivers on record, past court proceedings saw Matheson’s religious beliefs challenged when similar concerns were put forward.

Judge McDonald stated during the hearings, "I was expecting you to bring forth a medical professional so that the court could make a meaningful determination." So far in the case there has been no medical testimony; however, Judge McDonald’s statement has opened Pandora’s box for a medical professional, who understands the false assumptions vaccine science rests upon, to enter the fray as an expert witness.

Local Detroit news outlets rapidly found themselves in the big leagues, struggling to report on some inconvenient truths about vaccines with Matheson’s recent proceedings. Exhibited multiple times during the trial was the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) own information directly from their official government website detailing the ingredients of each individual vaccine on the CDC’s recommended schedule. But instead of taking seconds to pull up the CDC’s own ﻿document ﻿revealing the WI-38 cell line, obtained from an electively aborted fetus, on the list of vaccine ingredients and excipients,FOX 2 reportappealed to the authority of a random local area pediatrician who stated: "If I had to testify, I would say that vaccines are not made from aborted fetuses…" Such journalism and statements simultaneously make the reporter, the news outlet, and the doctor appear at best intellectually lazy and at worse ill-informed.

Perhaps the bigger picture in both Metro Detroit court cases is about informed consent in vaccination. In medicine, fully informed consent to both the known risks and potential benefits must be obtained from patients or their legal guardians before any vaccine is administered to them. In both cases, each mother was granted and had preferred caregiver status. Have Matheson, Bredow, or even their ex-husbands ever given a fully informed consent to the respective doctors who recommended the vaccinations?

In consideration of the laws and codes of Michigan’s informed consent [MDCH R 330.7003], by the unlawful detention of Bredow and the decision to usurp her right to choose for her child, the state has enjoined as actors in the violation of informed consent. With events leading up to Judge McDonald’s order to detain and imprison Bredow, the state appeared to have engaged in activities that were designed to force Bredow to make a decision against her better judgment.

In conclusion, a case could be made that the State of Michigan, by following the order of Judge McDonald to arrest and imprison Bredow, has prevented her from exercising her internationally, federally, and state-recognized right to freely consent to any, some, or no vaccines, and unlawfully denied her these freedoms to which she is entitled under the laws of the State of Michigan and the United States of America. What will be the outcome of Matheson’s case? What are the next steps for Bredow? Perhaps the only certainty is that this once off-the-radar Metro Detroit court has unknowingly ignited an international conversation about how far informed consent has eroded with respect to the practice of vaccination.